Should We Block Ads on Youtube?

So I have made two videos on how you can block ads on youtube on your computer and also on your mobile phones or tablets. Most viewers of these videos will find these videos from searching on youtube or a search engine for information on how to block ads or they may come across it when youtube suggests it to them. To be clear, while I made the videos on how you CAN do it, it doesn’t automatically mean that I am telling you to do it, or even suggesting that you SHOULD do it. I am not telling or suggesting that you do it, or not do it.

Economic Technological Dys/Utopia

You walk into a fast food restaurant. You do not speak to any staff but enter your order into a touchscreen machine. You pay the machine, which spits out a receipt with a queue number. You collect your food from the counter when your number appears on the screens. You sit down, you clear your own tray when finished and you leave. You make zero contact with the workers working there.

The Totalitarian Anatomy of Hellbound

Hellbound is a popular dark fantasy South Korean TV series. What speaks to me most about it is how the story is about a society’s metaphorical descent into totalitarianism. Totalitarianism you ask? Yes, that totalitarianism that we have already encountered in history from fascist Nazi Germany, Stalinist Soviet Union and the horrors of the Khmer Rogue regime in Cambodia.

What is Art for? Alfred North Whitehead on Truth, Beauty and Art in Adventures of Ideas

To look at the purpose of art, we first have to understand what art is. Alfred North Whitehead relates art to truth and beauty in the final section on Civilisation in his book Adventures of Ideas published in 1930. He systematically examines each of these notions, so he explains first what truth is, then what beauty is and then what art is, finally relating them to the purpose of art. This essay will recount his theory of these notions but first, some words on the man.

[Fiction] My Eulogy – Mea Culpa

[Christopher enters stage left, walking towards the podium in front of a coffin set up lengthwise but at an angle to the audience. The background is a clear night sky full of stars and the scene is moonlit. He had been tasked to read the eulogy his dearest friend, Alan, had prepared for himself, which was to be read at Alan’s funeral.]

I thank you all for coming this evening. I have intentionally arranged for my own self-written eulogy to be the last speech for today, the day you come to mourn my death. I regret that I have to speak to you like this, from beyond the grave. Please do not be mistaken that it is a mark of my insincerity. Indeed, it is quite the opposite.

The Experience Machine Part 2

Previously, I have explained what Nozick’s thought experiment on experience machines is about and his arguments against plugging in. If you have not watched it, please find the link, watch it first and then return here. To recap, his three arguments are and I quote:

1) “We want to do certain things, and not just have the experience of doing them.”

2) “We want to be a certain way, to be a certain sort of person.”

3) “Plugging into an experience machine limits us to a man-made reality.”

While they may seem reasonable, I have hinted at some scenarios such as wanting a holiday or to escape from a life of suffering, to be reasons why people might want to plug into the experience machine. I want to expand on that today, to argue against Nozick’s arguments and then reconcile it with what I think is the real takeaway from his thought experiment.

What is Everything?

Democritus: What is everything?

Socrates: Everything is a thing. Nothing is also a thing.

Democritus: Why is everything a thing?

Socrates: Everything is a thing and are things.

First, let’s tackle how everything is a thing, i.e. how everything is one single thing. Everything contains many things, in fact every single thing. What makes everything one thing is that it is a concept that covers, that encompasses, that is used to conceive of all things, including the concept itself.

This means that everything is a thing, including (the concept of) everything.

Democritus: But isn’t the word ‘thing’ used only to refer to material things?

Socrates: Things can be material things or immaterial things.

Dialectical and Historical Materialism by Joseph Stalin

“Dialectical materialism is the world outlook of the Marxist-Leninist party,”[1] reads the first sentence of Stalin’s text, which explains the importance of his book, Dialectical and Historical Materialism. Originally published in 1938, it was a section of a chapter in a larger book entitled History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course. [https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1939/x01/]

In the year of publication, Stalin was the secretary-general of the Communist Party and already he had amassed a lot of power. He will become the premier of the Soviet Union three years later. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, he exercised dictatorial rule over the Soviet Union for a quarter of a century. Among his achievements is his industrialisation of the Soviet Union, bringing it from peasant nation to the country with the 2nd highest industrial output only behind the US. During his rule, the USSR also defeated the Nazis during the second world war, and he led the Soviet Union into the nuclear age. However, he did all these through a paranoid reign of terror that led to the deaths of tens of millions including the most powerful members of the elite closest to him. [https://www.britannica.com/biography/Joseph-Stalin]

Against Method by Paul Feyerabend

What is science? A common understanding of what differentiates science from other disciplines and pseudoscience is the scientific method. What then is this method? Philosophers of science have attempted to answer this question, and to understand what led Paul Feyerabend to his conclusions in his book Against Method, we need to understand the book in its context of prior theories put forward to answer these questions. To do this, we need a brief excursion through the history of the philosophy of science up to the time of the book’s publication in 1975.

Socrates’s Last Days

Credit: Eric Gaba, Wikimedia Commons user: Sting

I want to tell you a great story of heroism, bravery and tragedy. It is the story of Socrates’s last days, which took place about 2,300 years ago and remains an important touchstone for the history of philosophy today.

An Introduction to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason

Immanuel Kant is an 18th century philosopher, belonging to the era of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is an intellectual epoch where reason triumphed over faith. Kant is arguably one of the greatest intellectuals of all time, and his Critique of Pure Reason is considered his magnum opus. It was published when he was 57, so he had a whole lifetime to meditate upon the nature of reason. So don’t expect the book to be an easy read. It is precisely for this reason that an introduction to it can be helpful, to understand what his project is about and its broad strokes.

Kant wrote Critique to enquire into the nature of reason, laying the path for that by first examining how we perceive and understand things.

A Meditation on Meditation

First off, I just want to relate my thoughts and experiences on meditation. I am not a spiritual guru, nor some kind of mindfulness expert. I only have my own experience and my rather modest reading on meditation to talk about, but I think it can be helpful for those who have tried it and “failed” or who don’t really have any inkling on what meditation is about.

Meno: Plato on Ethics and Epistemology

While Plato’s Meno is ostensibly about ethics since it discusses virtue, it is also about epistemology, i.e. the theory of knowledge. Written in 385 BC,[1] the plot is about a man, Meno, who is talking to Socrates about the nature of virtue. Meno wanted to know if virtue can be taught, gained through practice or is inborn.

A Brief Meditation on Time

From the very beginning, when we emerge crying and screaming into the world, the clock starts ticking, its hands sweeping through space, marking our moments, and counting down towards the moment time will end for us.

Even before our birth, others, our mothers, our fathers, the doctors, our siblings, have already started counting our time for us, from conception to emergence. And then after to begin worrying for us, that our time here will be all too brief, and for some, all too long.

The clock, the calendar, they rule our lives. We worry when we have too little time, we are in too much of a rush; we fret when we have too much time, feeling as if we are stuck in a waiting room of our lives waiting for life itself to “begin,” when it has really carried on unabated. In our youths, we think we have forever, even if there are those who do die young. In our old age, we grieve over what time we have left. Yet if we allow ourselves to be ruled by the clock, we find ourselves almost as if we wish each event to be over so we can hurry on to the next. Yet if we don’t abide by time, we find ourselves missing opportunities, trains, examinations and appointments.

Counterfactual Conditionals: Regrets, the Future and Decision-Making

One might think that philosophy dwells on what is not relevant to life, especially in areas such as logic which can seem so abstract and hence divorced from reality. Arthur Schopenhauer acknowledges this when he writes: “To seek to make practical use of logic would … mean to seek to derive with unspeakable trouble from universal rules what is immediately known to us with the greatest certainty in the particular case. It is just as if a man were to consult mechanics with regard to his movements.”[1] Lest you misunderstand, Schopenhauer does think logic is of great theoretical importance, it just isn’t practically useful. Nonetheless, I want to talk about an application of the concept of counterfactual conditionals to real life, to illuminate what might not really be so obvious.

Can’t We be Friends? Analysing Singapore’s LGBT Struggle Through a Schmittian Lens

It is often better to be a friend than an enemy of the state. This paper uses Carl Schmitt’s concept of the political and its friend-enemy distinction to analyse Singapore’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transexual (LGBT) situation. While Schmitt describes the political as a domain where participants may have to engage in physical combat when pushed to the extreme, this paper applies his concepts to politicians ‘fighting’ for their political lives, to be elected. Analysing Singapore’s laws and policies affecting the LGBT using Schmitt’s concepts suggests that the conservative segments of society belong to the friend-group and the LGBT community the enemy-group, because of greater electoral support from the former due to its larger numbers. Hence, it is coherent that Singapore’s leaders have indicated that societal acceptance of LGBTs is an important criterion to change the country’s policies affecting them. Therefore, a plausibly suitable strategy is to sway the electorate so that they will decide that the LGBT community, currently an enemy, is instead a friend. The paper suggests how this can be done and the price its members may have to pay.

Mea Culpa: Why the Developed World is Responsible for the Global Poor

The global order harms the poor. Thomas Pogge argues that the causes of global poverty are systemic, refuting the notion that the misery in poor countries are mostly self-induced. We, the developed world, are the architects of the global order and continue to run it to the detriment of the global poor. Hence, we have the responsibility to fix it. This order is comprised of economic and institutional parts. By examining both parts, we can then identify the causes of the problems and propose possible solutions.

Superabundance and Excess: Is Bataille’s Conception of General Economy Credible?

Georges Bataille’s concept of general economy strikes at the core of our prevailing understanding of economics. He posits two contrasting premises in the first volume of The Accursed Share (TAS):

1) The condition of the world is one of superabundance rather than scarcity. Bataille proposes that all life and wealth derive from the sun, which is effectively an unlimited source of energy. In the general economy, what the world faces is not scarcity, as foundationally assumed in conventional economics, but superabundance. While pockets of poverty can be found, the world on aggregate has an excess of wealth.

2) However, there are limits to growth, because there is only so much space on the planet which life can occupy. Once the limits are reached, no further growth is possible. Hence the excess cannot be used for growth; it cannot be saved and it needs to be expended. The choice we have is to either expend it well or badly.

Is Bataille’s conception of general economy credible? In addition to examining these two premises, this paper investigates Bataille’s method to reconceptualise how we can understand the world by adopting a radical position on political economy so as to derive novel insights. Specifically, I analyse his idea of limits and savings, his empirical approach and his critique of scarcity and utility in conventional economics. I contrast his views of capitalism and potlatch with Jean-Joseph Goux’s critique that Bataille’s solution of consumption has already come to pass in today’s capitalist economies and George Gilder’s notion that giving is central to entrepreneurial capitalism, and propose a possible Bataillean response. I then consider Andrew Abbott’s extension to Bataille’s theory of general economy, which Abbott draws on to argue that problems of excess are fundamentally different from problems of scarcity, hence requiring their own solutions. I conclude by assessing whether Bataille has been successful in challenging conventional economics and the applicability of TAS to political economy today.

My Reflections on Nomadland

I am the Philosophical Bachelor and today I want to talk about Nomadland, a front runner for the Best Picture at this year’s Oscars in 20 21 and already the winner of the best picture at the Golden Globes. So I had finished watching the film just last night and when I was recommending it to my friend, he asked, what is it about?

While that is seemingly an obvious and also simple question, it set me thinking—so what really is nomadland about? The story itself is simple, of a woman, named Fern, who was travelling across America in search of work but that is of course not what makes this a great film. What is characteristic of the best films, is how they have the capability to speak to each of us in our own individual condition, in different ways. For adults who have had some experience in life, they will see themselves in her situation, perhaps only in some narrow aspect, but yet they will be able to sympathise or at least understand, to empathise with her situation in its manifold of details, from the pain of separation, from having to power through a grinding day at work, from the suffering of the cold, to her hunger, her anguish but also her joy. 

The Observer Effect

The observer effect is a phenomena in physics where just from the act of observation, the experimental results are changed. It is the disturbance of an observed system by the act of observation. The instruments used to measure the data, by necessity, alter the state of what they measure in some way. I want to use this effect as an analogy of how, human being as actors, modify the situation, since we, like the observer, insert ourselves into the space of action, hence changing the space of action. The elements in that space react to us, as we react to them. 

The Paradox of Tolerance for the Faithful

A devout believer of a specific religion, given the strength of her devotion, is likely to hold that the doctrines of her religion are the monolithic truth, and that her gods are the true gods. Since there are many religions, they cannot all be true, if her religion is the true one. Therefore, she must conclude that the other religions must be false. There hence exists a tension between tolerance, pluralism and truth, with religious ideologies as a potential source of intolerance.

Johan De Tavernier examines this tension at the institutional, cultural and theological levels, explaining how our understanding of tolerance has evolved and can be justified. However, there is a paradox between a staunch religious belief and a tolerance for the belief of others. This paradox can be resolved if we understand that in tolerance, justice and love for others is more important than judging whose version of truth is right. I propose some practical measures that believers can take in the face of the challenge from tolerance, in line with De Tavernier’s belief that believers should avoid fanaticism, and instead adopt a quiet conviction. 

Types of Reasoning According to Averroes

People have different levels of ability, according to Averroes (d. 1198). They belong broadly to the demonstrative class, the dialectical class and the rhetorical class. These 3 classes correspond to the 3 types of reasoning, demonstrative, dialectical and rhetorical. 

 

 

 

Ockham’s Connectedness of Virtues

William of Ockham (d. 1347) posits that moral virtue is an ethically-charged habit caused by moral acts that inclines or disposes us to perform similar acts. It is a feedback loop of acts leading to habits leading to further acts which then further reinforces the habit. This is contrary to the Independence of Act-Opportunity Principle where even if we have the opportunity to have one virtue, say temperance, it does not mean we will have the opportunity for other virtues such as justice. The act-opportunities are independent of one another. Since habits come from doing an act, if we never have the chance to act justly, then according to this principle, we will not be able to develop the virtue of justice, since no opportunities to act justly will mean no acts of justice. No acts of justice mean we do not form the habit of being just, leading to not acquiring the virtue of being just.

How We Learn, According to Augustine

According to Augustine (d. 430), we do not learn about the things themselves through words, since if we did not already know what words like green, room and cabinet mean, the word will not teach it to us. However, words do have a function – they prompt us by directing our attention to “remind us to look for things.” (The Teacher, p. 137, l. 170) We have to be prompted, to compare what we have been told, to consult our “inner light” (p. 140, l. 31), that is, God, to make the judgement if what is told is true.